Canadian Content

Sunday, January 10, 2016

This week Elder Adams left Charleville after 6 good months of missionary efforts.  He is transferring to Brest.  When we dropped him off at the gare, we realised how much we are going to miss him.  He made a big impact on our Branch and our members.  

To celebrate his efforts the Biver family had us over for FHE.  We had dinner and played games with them,  They also gave Elder Adams a little going away gift.  We had moules (mussels), frites (fries), cordon bleu and "galette du roi".  We also played a cool game where you had to find certain objects on a round game board that had hundreds of images on  it.  It was quite fun.

Let me elaborate a bit on this "La Galette Des Roi" thing.  January 6 is celebrated in a low key fashion as the Epiphany in France.  It is supposedly the date that the 3 wisemen visited the infant Jesus.  In France they celebrate it with a "galette du roi" or "cake of the king".  The galette du roi is a round cake which has a bean hidden inside it.  They call it a bean but it is actually a little porcelain figurine.  The idea is that whoever finds the bean in their piece of cake is the king or queen, whatever the case may be.  Once the cake is cut the youngest person present says names of the people present with his back turned while someone points to a piece of "galette".  If you find the bean, you get to wear a crown for the rest of the night.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Pretty fun but I certainly wouldn't want to bite into it!

As a side we couldn't resist including this beautiful picture that Isabelle's father painted of Espalion, France.  It has a cool Medieval Bridge. 

Love this with the reflection of the buildings in the water.  Beautiful painting.

In Canada we have a law that says all TV stations and radio stations  must broadcast a certain percentage of Canadian content.  With the departure of Elder Adams he was replaced by a francophone Québecois, complete with the thick accent.  Elder Gagnon is actually from a village about half an hour from where Ed lived in Quebec as a kid.  With his arrival we have far surpassed the Canadian content rule for our missionary efforts in Charleville.  Three out of four missionaries are Canadian and half of our 6 man district is too.  Of course, the first time we had him over for supper we had to have something with maple syrup in  it.  So we put some on top of a baked apple.

Our Wednesday night activity at the church was the first for Elder Gagnon.  Elder Daines was once again crowned king as he was the lucky one to find the treasure in the cake.

We started our apartment rounds this week again.  We went to St. Quentin and checked the 2 apartments there.  There were two new sisters there, Soeur Morris and Soeur Hogan.  There was also one new Elder, Elder Blackham with Elder Von Tonder.  Ed had to replace a door handle and we put up some curtains.  When we got home Lynn looked in the mirror only to discover, much to her chagrin, that she had spent the day sporting two different earrings.  I guess that's much better than two different shoes!

On Saturday Ed took a contingent of Charleville-Mézières members headed to St. Quentin for some Stake training on how to best meet the needs of our respective congregations.  Our Branch Conference next Sunday.  This will be the second Branch Conference of our mission and so we are old pros at it by now.

We got a fun package from the Postman this week.  It was from Lara Hall and family.  They found a package of cupcake liners that have Volkswagen Beetles on them.  Of course they immediately thought of us.  Lynn made the cupcakes at Lakeview and Ed has a great love for Volkswagen Beetles.   What a thoughtful little treasure for us.  Thanks Lara.

We had a great family experience on Saturday.  One of our grandchildren was baptised.  Wilson Jesse Michel had a great baptism ceremony.  His older brother, Peter, and his Mom, Lise-Anne, gave great talks on the Holy Ghost and Baptism respectively.   We were able to be present electronically through FaceTime.  It was awesome.  He looked pretty happy.  We are so grateful for the opportunity we had to view that wonderful event. Thanks to Amy and Jack for manning the FaceTime event for us.

Congrats on your baptism Wilson.  We love you so much.

We continued to be uplifted through the lessons we taught, through our association with the members of our Branch and through the missionaries.  We did take part in some missionary lessons, as usual.

At folk dance this week we found out that we are going to take part in some dancing demonstrations at a market in a nearby village.  We look forward to this.  We are going to travel there with some friends that we carpool with to dance.  And once again we ate 3 more Galette des Roi's.  Lynn was one of the lucky winners with her first Fève, "Mr Indestructible".

"Monsiur Indestructible"

This week was the start of the semi annual sales in France.  We even found a little time to do some snooping around some of the shops in town.

That's all we have for this week.  It's a wrap.

Au revoir de la France,
Lyndi-Lou and Eddie, too.